"Calendar Campaigns" Keep the Life Issues on Your Mind Year-Round
BY Holly Smith

Displaying the development of unborn babies month-to-month is a great way to educate your community to the sanctity of life year-round. Several pro-life groups have found creative ways to accomplish this by adapting the basic idea to the behaviors of their audience.

Louisiana Right to Life Federation, an NRLC affiliate, has printed and sold pro-life calendars for many years. Its calendars feature adorable pictures of children accompanied by life-affirming quotes. Since everyone will need a new calendar in less than two months, printing and selling pro-life calendars can be an informative and fun-loving way to promote the right to life and raise some money for your chapter.

Kandice Kramer, who works in National Right to Life's Development Department, used images of a baby's first months after conception, along with text describing each stage of human development from fertilization to birth, to create a 12-month calendar. Each month highlighted the development of a baby during that stage of gestation.

Since gestation is officially nine months, (although, in reality, it can be closer to ten as those of us who have been pregnant know), the final months of the calendar showcased cute baby pictures and information on life-affirming alternatives to abortion. Simply by displaying the calendar, its owners receive a daily reminder of the wonder of unborn life and a good education on fetal development.

On college campuses, students have been educating their peers on the humanity of the unborn by hanging large posters on bulletin boards with photographs of human development each month. Campuses have long been hostile places for pro-life advocacy, so the silent witness of beautiful posters depicting life before birth is an effective way to get a message across without being silenced by pro-abortion professors.

Using the nine-month school schedule, the end of the school year corresponds with when the baby would be born. The campus right-to-life group often takes this opportunity to host a baby shower with the goods collected being donated to the local pro-life pregnancy center.

Initiated a few years ago at Harvard University by Harvard Right to Life, the poster campaign, usually named for a fictitious baby girl, has been successfully performed on other campuses as well. Choose Life at Yale (CLAY) is receiving a lot of attention at its Ivy League campus for its "Lucy Campaign." There has been enough discussion in only its eighth week that the campus newspaper, the Yale Daily News, has reported on it, thereby demonstrating that one of CLAY's goals--that the Lucy campaign will encourage discourse about the issue on campus--has already been met. (See story, page 19.)

Finally, a "Spiritual Adoption" project is a wonderful program to coordinate with private Christian and parochial schools or Sunday schools and CCD classes. Encourage students and their families to "spiritually adopt" one unborn baby who is in danger of being aborted. The family then prays daily for this unknown baby and that her parents will choose life.

Once a month, someone from your chapter should go to these classes and explain the child's development over the course of the past month to help the children understand the humanity of the unborn child. Nine months later, teachers can hold baby showers for the spiritual adoptees in their classrooms and students can bring baby clothes and toys to donate to your pro-life pregnancy center.

Each of these unique programs magnificently highlights the humanity of the unborn child while educating its targeted audience on the facts regarding human development. Anyone who can see these images and the corresponding details about the baby's maturation can not honestly also believe that an unborn baby is "a blob of tissue."